|
This blogg is going to be a series of 6 blogg covering what I’ve been doing during the course Big Game Project at Uppsala University – Campus Gotland.
In this course the students are to create a game for the fantastic Gotland Game Conference. This blogg will cover my individual work in this production.
Each week i will put up a bloggpost of what i’ve done up to that point.
This week is the 3rd week of production and I’ll talk about what I’ve done during the 2nd.
I’m the lead designer and the main 2D artist of the game A rat betwixt.
A rat betwixt is a game set in the far future where technology has been mostly forgotten. Just as we today find historical items and misinterpret their use, so does the people in our game. Different culture arises from different findings linking them together and misunderstanding their uses. A great example of this is the culture of the character Dyrkare.
(credit: Sakarias Ståhl, check his blogg at http://rostfriblog.wordpress.com)
This character is based on a Diver and a classic Crusader. They have misinterpreted the use of diving suits as armor. They also believe in a distorted version of Evolution thinking we originated from fish and that the chain of events has taken a couple of thousand years. Therefor the diving inspired helmet and tank on the back. The harpoon and the manhole cover are also related to water and easily misread as other objects such as shields and spears.
Up to this point I’ve been working mainly on the characters of the game and their respective turn around.
We have 4 main characters that will all hopefully make it in to the game. The first character being the earlier mentioned dyrkare.
The characters i’ve been working on are the Kapellmeister, inspired by music instruments and the Pyrofet a character that knows more about technology than most, using it to fool society that he’s a magician.
A recurring theme is the hidden faces in the form of masks or helmets. This is to go with the theme of the game that you never know a persons true intention, this is represented with a mechanic in the game that all players have an individual goal to fulfill. One of the goals will always be to hinder the other players in one way or another.
  
These are the concept for the 2 characters. I’m currently working on the turnaround for both these characters.
As for the design i have been working on the paper prototype for the game. However regrettably did not take pictures of the paper prototyp. The paper prototype was a grid with 10 times 10 squares. A character is set up using a marker on each square, same goes for the enemies. There are 2 enemies per player character in this paper prototype.
Each player plans out their actions and a game master plans out how to move the enemies.
Walking 1 square take 1 action point.
Attacking takes 2 action points.
You can wait 1 turn it takes 1 action point.
Each character has 5 action points to plan out their round. Each round goes through each action point clockwise in turn and order.
The players have 10 hp each. There are 2 different enemies one large with 3 hp one smaller with 1 hp.
There is one of each enemy for each player.
Every attack makes 1hp worth of damage.
This is so that the player can play more than one consecutive encounter.
We found it to be interesting enough however there were still more components that needed testing. For example the different goals/roles, we wanted each attack to have an AoE. AoE means Area of effect meaning it affect a whole area instead of a specific target.
This was solved thanks to the fantastic programmers in the team, they made a prototype the first week and we were able to implement and test most of these mechanics on a digital prototype.
Lastly I’ve been working on art for the design document, mostly the cover art.
About Sebastian Engstrand
2015 Graphics
|
